In March Frontpage profiled Californian Nicholas Michael Teausant, indicted for attempting to support ISIS, a foreign terrorist organization. Teausant remains in custody but recently granted an enlightening interview to Sam Stanton and Denny Walsh of the Sacramento Bee.
In March Teausant was en route to Canada and near the border texted a friend who told him “if I get myself out of the country everything will be taken care of, they’ll pay for me to go over there, they’ll give me a gun.” He had been in the National Guard but had not brought along a weapon. His friend also told him “They’ll give me everything I could possibly want. They’ll take care of my family, and that I can always come back to America when this is over.” The friend turned out to be an FBI informer, and that led to his arrest.
“I’m not going to say that I’m completely innocent and I have no fault in this,” Teausant told the reporters. “Some of it is my fault, yes. But then again I also feel that if the informant hadn’t come along I would have just been making idle boasts and I wouldn’t have done anything.” But there’s more to the story.
Teausant told the reporters that while living in Montana he met a beautiful Muslim woman who would speak only to Muslim men. That spurred his interest in Islam, but it wasn’t only romantic. The zealous convert came to believe his daughter’s day care center was “Zionist.” He wanted to blow it up but claims he told the informant he would only bomb the place when nobody was there. Teausant doesn’t recall discussing any bomb attacks in Los Angeles but on fighting overseas he showed good recall. The newly minted Muslim soon became convinced that the government of Syria needed to be taken down.
“I wanted to go help fight for these people because the New Hampshire slogan is ‘Live Free or Die,’” he told the Bee reporters. “In 1775, we rebelled against Britain because we felt we were being tyrannized and conquered, so we wanted our own freedom. So I felt like I could try and help with that, and give the people freedom that they were fighting for.”